Lager Lager Lager

Fat, yellow Buddhas abound
The bus dumped us on the outskirts of Hoi An around 7am. I felt grouchy and was determined to find a hotel myself, so I began a big tour around the small town. By the time I'd walked the length of the place, stopping in every budget hotel listed in the Lonely Planet but finding a problem with all of them, I was shattered and still without a place to stay.

I walked back to the last one I'd passed and took a room.

Bad choice. It was expensive, empty and the decor was more suited for a reluctant suicide-job who wanted to make sure this time. Everything was made of black teak or mahogany. The walls. The chest of drawers. The bed. The only things that weren't was the bed linen, the embroided tablecloths, the doilies and the mosquito net. They were snow white.

I felt like I was in a BBC period drama with all the gloom and lace. Even the bed creaked in a spooky way when I sat on it. It got me out the room at least.

The mood came with me though, and I spent the day moping around. In the late afternoon a surge of energy found me hiring a bike and pedalling to the beach, 5 klicks away. At this point I regressed to typical-Brit-abroad-mode and acted like a beached whale on the sand -- reading and people watching and stuffing down the odd ice-cream or two. This set me up for a futher deterioration towards total lout status; I spent the early evening watching the Man U - Arsenal FA Cup match with a crowd of other Brits, ate pizza and guzzled beer. I might as well have been back home.

It wasn't homesickness as much as just letting myself slide into a familiar routine. The talk was standard blokey fare: football and women and laughs. Nothing unusual, and most the time I enjoy it, but tonight it just depressed me. I headed back to the hotel and read a little before the black decor beat me into submission and I turned the lights out.

Being away from any obligations, I've begun to notice the natural rhythm of my moods. It's all too easy to ascribe bad feelings to recent events, when in fact it often has more of a long-term, underlying cause, or is just part of a normal cycle of feelings.

Looking back from 2006 I think I've definitely smoothed those negative feelings out a little, and managed to channel feelings of anger or frustration in more productive ways. The Hungarian tax system is currently testing my 'If you can't change it, change your thinking about it' mantra, but even a hassle like that is washing over me these days. Anyway, apologies to anyone in the past who's had to endure my explosions of rage when the anger dam burst -- and that includes a completely innocent kid on a bike in rural France back in 1994.

After ten hours non-stop driving to make a ferry connection in Calais, all the way listening to the heavy-metal, verbal drivel, snoring, and bodily noises of my four mates, I flipped out, wound down my window and yelled 'F@$! You' in the kid's ear from point-blank range.

Poor kid nearly fell off his bike.